A mud-covered boat is seen in a dried lake bed. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

In California, 2013 was a record-setting year because of the lack of rainfall. A professor at UC Berkeley warns this time could go into the record books as the driest in centuries.

“Some people have said that this could be the start of a several decade-long dry spell,” Lynn Ingram, professor of paleoclimatology told KPIX 5. Ingram examines history to help forecast the future.

Dried up creek beds along with golden hills that look like its August instead of January could become our typical landscape, if history repeats itself.

Ingram is the author of the book “The West without Water.” She looked back 10 to 20 thousand years and came to the conclusion that we live in a dry climate.

“It’s important to understand our climate history and know when were the droughts, and then we also had years of extreme floods,” Ingram said.

A study about tree rings led her to predict that we could be in for the driest winter in 500 years. Narrow tree rings indicate little or no water for growth, just like people saw in the 1500s.

“They put on rings every single year. So you can actually be able to detect one year of drought,” Ingram said.

Another indication, but not as precise, are sediment cores that can span a few thousand years and point to the saltiness of San Francisco Bay.

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Source: CBS San Francisco | Ann Notarangelo